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Charter has given us a peek at how the big ISPs are likely to take advantage of the end of net neutrality. Charter is in the middle of a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The suit attacks Charter for promising to deliver Internet speeds as part of the purchase of Time Warner that the company knew it couldn’t deliver. There are other allegations in the suit and I covered it in this earlier blog.

While the FCC won’t formally vote to end Title II regulation for another week it’s largely a foregone conclusion that they will do so. Charter is assuming that it’s a done deal and they have filed paperwork trying to dismiss the New York lawsuit based upon the assumption that the FCC will end net neutrality.

Charter has sent a letter to the courts and is making the following claims:

Federal law preempts state and local laws. Charter is arguing that the planned FCC order will preempt state and local laws concerning broadband. This is an aspect of the proposed FCC order that has not gotten much attention. The proposed FCC order contains a long discussion that talks about the role of federal versus state regulations and comes to the conclusion that federal low should override state and local broadband laws. It’s sort of an ironic position for the FCC to take since they are actually eliminating the FCC’s role in regulating broadband – but they interpret that to mean that states and localities also have no right to regulate broadband.

Charter specifically says that New York can’t criticize the company for delivering slow Internet speeds. They argue that since the FCC will no longer regulate broadband and Internet speeds that New York also does not have the right to do so.

Paid Prioritization. Charter is also arguing that New York has no right to regulate paid prioritization. This is one of the three principles of net neutrality that currently is in effect. Charter is arguing that the FCC’s proposed ‘light-touch’ regulation means that the FCC will be eliminating the net neutrality principles and this means that these principles can no longer be used to judge Charter’s products.

The New York lawsuit had attacked Charter for not maintaining a robust enough network that could deliver the speeds customers need. Specifically, New York alleged that people were unable to watch Netflix and that Charter’s network failures amount to throttling of the Netflix data stream.

The new FCC rules aren’t even in effect yet, but this tells a lot about how the big ISPs are viewing the change in rules. Charter wants to use these rules to protect themselves against any fines for not delivering advertised broadband speeds to customers. They also are openly acknowledging that they have no obligations against violations of the current net neutrality rules – and that they have no obligations to ever try to meet them.

Charter’s arguments in the case erase any doubt about how the big ISPs intend to act once they are not regulated. While they will probably generally try to deliver a decent broadband product, they feel under no legal obligation to do so. If you go back and look at the facts in this case you will see customers in New York who have been paying for clearly inferior broadband for years – broadband that is far slower than advertised and that is even too slow to deliver Netflix. Charter promised to fix the network issues that are causing the slow broadband, but it’s clear from the New York lawsuit that no upgrades have been implemented. Lack of broadband regulations might mean that the Charter customers in New York might never get good broadband – the company doesn’t think they have any obligation to provide it.

Charter’s response to this lawsuit largely validates all of the consumer fears that have been expressed as part of the net neutrality debate. The FCC is washing their own hands of anything having to do with broadband regulation, and are also preempting states and localities for doing anything. This leaves the consumer with no place to go to remedy, or even protest bad ISP behavior.

One hopes that the big ISPs want to deliver a decent broadband product – but the facts in this case show a blatant disregard for both customers and regulators. Charter has promised to improve the condition of the Time Warner networks as part of the merger but then failed to do so. The sad fact is that many of the customers with the shoddy Charter service have no real alternative. DSL is dying and the cable companies are becoming virtual monopolies in most of the markets in the country. If Charter prevails with these arguments it will show that there is no regulatory body with the ability to police the ISPs.

The FCC voted last week to re-examine the rules for the deployment of 3.5 GHz spectrum for wireless broadband. This is the spectrum that has generally been referred to as Citizen’s Band Radio. This change clearly favors large carriers over the small carriers which were the targeted users from the existing rules.

The specific changes proposed by the rules include:

Lengthened the length of a license from 1 year to 10 years.

Eliminate the rules that the exclusivity of a license expires at the end of the first license term. Exclusivity can now extend into a license renewal.

Increase the size of the geographic footprint of a license. The license area before was a census tract, which is generally an area encompassing 2,500 to 8,000 people. The Census views a tract as the equivalent of a ‘neighborhood’. The new licenses areas are proposed to be something larger like entire counties or else Partial Economic Areas (PEAs). PEAs were defined in the recent incentive auctions and subdivide the country into 416 PEA regions.

Eliminated the rules that limited the number of licenses that can be held by one entity in an area. This also would allow license holders to bid on the use of individual channels.

What does all of this mean? This is largely a shift to allow big wireless carriers to obtain and use the spectrum for cellular service. Before the spectrum rules were aimed at benefiting small rural broadband providers. They would have been able to get a license for a small geographic area and they then got a 1-year head-start to deploy the spectrum before anybody else. The first licensee then had an advantage because future deployments had to be synchronized to not interfere with them.

The old rules made it difficult, but not impossible, for the bigger companies to use the spectrum. A cellular provider was not likely to invest in small license footprints and only be protected for a year from competition and interference. But the new rules allow for a much bigger footprint, similar to that used for other cellular spectrum. And the ten-year license provides a long-term opportunity for no competition, as well as a chance to renew the original license.

Basically this is a spectrum grab by the cellular providers to use for LTE or 5G cellular. Two of the big proponents of these changes include Comcast and Charter which want their own spectrum to support their new cellular businesses.

This change will make it much harder for rural deployments by WISPs and other ISPs willing to serve customers with wireless connections. The original rules also envisioned that this spectrum would enable smaller carriers to deploy various small-cell technologies and not just point-to-multipoint radios.

This is another proposed ruling that shows that current FCC is now clearly pro-big business. Almost every ruling they’ve made so far benefits big companies – the big ISPs, the big TV station owners, and the big wireless carriers. This particular ruling is a big give-away to the cellular companies and to Comcast and Charter. Under the rules the spectrum can be licensed inexpensively compared to spectrum that is auctioned. The new rules allowing large coverage areas will greatly disadvantage small carriers that only want to license a small service area – which was the entire purpose of the original rules for the spectrum.

The FCC voted 4-1 to consider the new rules, which is a likely indication that the new rules will be adopted after the required deliberation time required by FCC rules.

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As the FCC continues its effort to reversing Title II regulation, I’ve seen the carriers renewing their argument that Title II regulation has reduced their willingness to invest in infrastructure. However, their numbers and other actions tell a different story.

The FCC put broadband under Title II regulation in February of 2015 and revised the net neutrality rules a few months later in April. So we’ve now had nearly three years to see the impact on the industry – and that impact is not what the carriers are saying it is.

First, we can look at annual infrastructure spending for the big ISPs. Comcast spent $7.6 billion upgrading its cable plant in 2016, its highest expenditure ever. Charter spent 15% more in 2016 compared to what was spent on it and the cable companies it purchased. Even Verizon’s spending was up in 2016 by 3% over 2015 even though the company had spun off large fiber properties in Florida, Texas, California and other states. AT&T spent virtually the same amount on capital on 2015 and 2016 as it had done in 2013 and 2014.

I’ve seen a number of articles that focus on the overall drop in investment from the cellular industry in 2015. But that drop is nearly 100% attributable to Sprint, which pulled back on new capital spending due to lack of cash. All of the big cellular companies are now crowing about how much they are going to spend in the next few years to roll-out 5G.

It’s important to remember that what the big ISPs tell their investors is often quite different than what they say when lobbying. As publicly traded companies the ISPs are required by law to provide accurate financial data including a requirement to warn stockholders about known risk factors that might impact stock prices. I’m one of those guys that actually reads financial statements and I’ve not seen a single warning about the impact of Title II regulation in the financial reporting or investor press releases of any of the big ISPs.

But the lobbying side of these businesses is a different story. The big ISPs started complaining about the risks of Title II regulations as far back as 2013 when it was first suggested. The big companies and their trade associations have written blogs warning about Title II regulation and predicted that it would stifle innovation and force them to invest less. And they’ve paid to have ‘scholarly’ articles written that come to the same conclusion. But these lobbying efforts are aimed mostly at the FCC and at legislators, not at stockholders.

The fact that big corporations can get away with having different public stories has always amazed me. One would think that something published on the AT&T or Comcast blog would be under the same rules as documents formally given to investors – but it’s obviously not. AT&T in particular tells multiple stories because the company wears so many different hats. In the last year the company has taken one position as an owner of poles that is diametrically opposed to the position it takes as a cellular company that wants to get onto somebody else’s poles. Working in policy for the big ISPs has to be a somewhat schizophrenic situation.

It seems almost certain that this FCC is going to reverse Title II regulation. The latest rumor floating around is that it will be on their agenda on the day before Thanksgiving. That may lead you to ask why the ISPs are still bothering cranking out the lobbying arguments against Title II if they have already won. I think they are still working hard to get a legislative solution through Congress to kill Title II regulation and net neutrality, even if the FCC kills it for now. I think they well understand that a future FCC under a different administration could easily reinstate Title II regulation – particularly now that it has passed muster through several court challenges. The ISPs understand that it will be a lot harder to get a future Congress to reverse course than it might be if Democrats are back in charge of the FCC.

Until recently I always wondered why the ISPs are fighting so hard against Title II regulation. All of the big companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have told stockholders that their initial concerns about Title II regulation did not materialize. And it’s obvious that Title II hasn’t changed the way they invest in their own companies.

But recently I saw an article and wrote a blog about an analyst who thinks that the ISPs are going to drastically increases broadband prices once Title II regulation is gone. Title II is the only tool that the government can use to investigate and possibly act against the ISP for rate increases and for other practices like data caps. If true, and his arguments for this are good ones, then there is a huge motivation for the big ISPs to shed the only existing regulation of broadband.

Like this:

In what is bad news for consumers but good news for ISPs, a report by analyst Jonathan Chaplin of New Street Research predicts big increases in broadband prices. He argues that broadband is underpriced. Prices haven’t increased much for a decade and he sees the value of broadband greatly increased since it is now vital in people’s lives.

The report is bullish on cable company stock prices because they will be the immediate beneficiary of higher broadband prices. The business world has not really acknowledged the fact that in most US markets the cable companies are becoming a near-monopoly. Big telcos like AT&T have cut back on promoting DSL products and are largely ceding the broadband market to the big cable companies. We see hordes of customers dropping DSL each quarter and all of the growth in the broadband industry is happening in the biggest cable companies like Comcast and Charter.

I’ve been predicting for years that the cable companies will have to start raising broadband prices. The companies have been seeing cable revenues drop and voice revenues continuing to drop and they will have to make up for these losses. But I never expected the rapid and drastic increases predicted by this report. Chaplin sets the value of basic broadband at $90, which is close to a doubling of today’s prices.

The cable industry is experiencing a significant and accelerating decline in cable customers. And they are also facing significant declines in revenues from cord-shaving as customers elect smaller cable packages. But the cable products have been squeezed on margin because of programming price increases and one has to wonder how much the declining cable revenue really hurts their bottom line.

Chaplin reports that the price of unbundled basic broadband at Comcast is now $90 including what they charge for a modem. It’s even higher than that for some customers. Before I left Comcast last year I was paying over $120 per month for broadband since the company forced me to buy a bundle that included basic cable if I wanted a broadband connection faster than 30 Mbps.

Chaplin believes that broadband prices at Comcast will be pushed up to the $90 level within a relatively short period of time. And he expects Charter to follow.

If Chaplin is right one has to wonder what price increases of this magnitude will mean for the public. Today almost 20% of households still don’t have broadband, and nearly two-thirds of those say it’s because if the cost. It’s not hard to imagine that a drastic increase in broadband rates will drive a lot of people to use broadband alternatives like cellular data, even though it’s a far inferior substitute.

I also have to wonder what price increases of this magnitude might mean for competitors. I’ve created hundreds of business plans for markets of all sizes, and not all of them look promising. But the opportunities for a competitor improve dramatically if broadband is priced a lot higher. I would expect that higher prices are going to invite in more fiber overbuilders. And higher prices might finally drive cities to get into the broadband business just to fix what will be a widening digital divide as more homes won’t be able to afford the higher prices.

Comcast today matches the prices of any significant cable competitor. For instance, they match Google Fiber’s prices where the companies compete head-to-head. It’s not hard to foresee a market where competitive markets stay close to today’s prices while the rest have big rate increases. That also would invite in municipal overbuilders in places with the highest prices.

Broadband is already a high-margin product and any price increases will go straight to the bottom line. It’s impossible for any ISP to say that a broadband price increase is attributable to higher costs – as this report describes it, any price increases can only be justified by setting prices to ‘market’.

All of this is driven, of course, by the insatiable urge of Wall Street to see companies make more money every quarter. Companies like Comcast already make huge profits and in an ideal world would be happy with those profits. Comcast does have other ways to make money since they are also pursuing cellular service, smart home products and even now bundling solar panels. And while most of the other cable companies don’t have as many options as Comcast, they will gladly follow the trend of higher broadband prices.

Like this:

You can’t read an article about the cable industry without hearing about the erosion of customers due to cord cutting. So I thought I would take a look at the cable customers claimed by the largest cable companies at the end of the second quarters of 2016 and 2017.

2Q 2016

2Q 2017

Change

Comcast

22,396,000

22,516,000

120,000

0.5%

DirecTV

20,454,000

20,856,000

402,000

2.0%

Charter

17,312,000

17,071,000

(241,000)

-1.4%

Dish

13,593,000

11,892,000

(1,701,000)

-12.5%

AT&T

4,869,000

4,666,000

(203,000)

-4.2%

Verizon

4,637,000

3,853,000

(784,000)

-16.9%

Cox

4,330,000

4,245,000

(85,000)

-2.0%

Altice

3,639,000

3,463,000

(176,000)

-4.8%

Frontier

1,340,000

1,007,000

(333,000)

-24.9%

Mediacom

842,000

829,000

(13,000)

-1.5%

WOW

524,300

458,200

(66,100)

-12.6%

Cable ONE

338,974

297,990

(40,984)

-12.1%

94,275,274

91,154,190

(3,121,084)

-3.3%

These companies represent more than 95% of the whole TV market. According to Leichtman Research these companies together lost around 655,000 cable customers in the second quarter of this year.

What’s most striking about the above table is that the companies in aggregate lost 3.3% or over 3.1 million customers in the last year. One has to only go back two years to see the first instance of the industry losing customers, so these losses are recent. This is reminiscent to me to what happened to telephone landlines. The losses started very slowly, but then the rate of the decline picked up year after year. There is no way to know if cable will take the same path or if the drop in customers will be slower. But I think everybody in the industry from programmers to Wall Street is concerned about losses of this magnitude.

Interestingly, for now the big cable companies are largely maintaining earnings due to rate increases for the remaining cable customers plus continued growth in broadband customers. I’ll have a blog next week looking at the state of broadband.

There are a few interesting things to note in these numbers:

The losses in the second quarter of 2017 are actually smaller than the losses from that same quarter of 2016. But the year-over-year losses are significantly more now than they were in the year ending with 2Q 2016.

Satellite TV is getting clobbered. While DirecTV is higher, it’s offset to some extent by the loss of customers at parent AT&T which is shifting customers to the satellite platform. Dish networks is the big loser. Much of their customer losses have been offset by Sling TV adding over a million customers during the last year. But it’s rumored in the industry that Sling TV is operating at almost no margin.

Comcast continues to buck the rest of the industry and saw a tiny gain of customers over the last year.

When looking at these numbers you always must remember that the industry lost customers while there were around 1.5 million new residential living units build last year (homes and apartments). The gains that these companies got from those new homes, probably at least 1 million new customers is masked by the other losses, meaning that the industry lost over 4 million customers during the last year.

We know that the cable companies are continuing to take broadband customers from the telcos and there has to be some of that going on in these numbers.

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The last year was a busy one for mergers in the industry. We saw Charter gobble up Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. We saw CenturyLink buy Level 3 Communications. But those mergers were nothing like we see on the horizon right now. I can barely read industry news these days without reading about some rumored gigantic acquisitions.

There have always been mergers in the industry, but I can’t remember a time when there was this level of merger talk happening. This might be due in part to an administration that says it won’t oppose megamergers. It’s also being driven by Wall Street that makes a lot of money when they find the financing for a big merger. Here are just a few of the mergers being talked discussed seriously in the financial press:

Crown Castle and Lightower. This merger is already underway with Crown Castle paying $7.1 billion for Lightower. It matches up two huge fiber networks along with tower assets to make the new company the major player in the small cell deployment space, particularly in the northeast.

Discovery and Scripps. Discovery Communications announced a deal to buy Scripps Networks for about $11.9 billion. This reduces the already-small number of major programmers and Discovery will be picking up networks like the Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, the Cooking Channel and Great American Country.

Comcast, Altice and Charter. Citigroup issued a report that speculates that Comcast and Altice would together buy Charter and split the assets. Comcast would gain the former Time Warner cable systems with the rest going to Altice. There is also talk of Altice trying to finance the purchase of Charter on its own. But with Charter valued at about $120 billion while also carrying around $63 billion in debt that seems like a huge number to finance. This would be an amazing merger with the ink not yet dry on Charter’s merger with Time Warner.

Amazon and Dish Network. This makes sense because Amazon could finally help Dish capitalize on its 700 E-block and AWS-4 spectrum licenses. This network could be leveraged by Amazon to track trucks and packages, monitor the IoT and to control drones.

T-Mobile and Sprint. Deutsche Telecom currently owns 63% of T-Mobile and Softbank owns 82% of Sprint. A straight cashless merger would create an instantly larger company and gain major operational advantages. The FCC and the Justice Department nixed a merger between T-Mobile and AT&T a few years back, but in an environment where the cellular companies are getting into the wireless business this might sail through a lot easier today. Sprint has also been having negotiations for either a merger or some sort of partnership with Comcast and Charter.

Comcast and Verizon. There is also Wall Street speculation about Comcast buying Verizon. The big advantage would be to merge the Comcast networks with the Verizon Wireless assets. Comcast has a history of buying companies in distress and Verizon’s stock price has dipped 17% already this year. But this would still be a gigantic merger worth as much as $215 billion. There are also some major regulatory hurdles to overcome with the big overlap in the northeast between Comcast and the Verizon FiOS networks.

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I’ve always contended that the big ISPs, regardless of their public howling, want to be regulated. It is the nature of any company that is regulated to complain about regulation. For the last decade as AT&T and Verizon made the biggest telecom profits ever they have released press release after press release decrying how regulation was breaking their backs. The big telcos and cable companies spent the last few years declaring loudly that Title II regulation was killing incentives to make investments, while spending record money on capital.

A few months ago Comcast, Charter, and Cox filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit making its way through the US. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In that brief they asked the federal appeals court to restore the Federal Trade Commission’s jurisdiction over AT&T. The specific case being reviewed had to do with deceptive AT&T marketing practices when they originally offered unlimited cellular data plans. It turns out that AT&T throttled customer speeds once customers reached the meager threshold of 3 – 5 GB per month.

In 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for the practice and that’s the case now under appeal. It’s a bit extraordinary to see big ISPs siding with the government over another ISP, and the only reason that can be attributed to the suit is that these companies want there to be a stable regulatory environment. In the brief the cable companies expressed the desire to “reinstate a predictable, uniform, and technology-neutral regulatory framework that will best serve consumers and businesses alike.”

That one sentence sums up very well the real benefit of regulation to big companies. As much as they might hate to be regulated, they absolutely hate making huge investments in new product lines in an uncertain regulatory environment. When a big ISP knows the rules, they can plan accordingly.

One scenario that scares the big ISPs is living in an environment where regulations can easily change. That’s where we find ourselves today. It’s clear that the current FCC and Congress are planning on drastically reducing the ‘regulatory burden’ for the big ISPs. That sounds like an ideal situation for the ISPs, but it’s not. It’s clear that a lot of the regulations are being changed for political purposes and big companies well understand that the political pendulum swings back and forth. They dread having regulations that change with each new administration.

We only have to go back a few decades to see this in action. The FCC got into and then back out of the business of regulating cable TV rates several times in the late 1970s and the 1980s. This created massive havoc for the cable industry. It created uncertainty, which hurt their stock prices and made it harder for them to raise money to expand. The cable industry didn’t become stable and successful until Congress finally passed several pieces of cable legislation to stop these regulatory swings.

Big companies also are not fond of being totally deregulated. That is the basis for the amicus brief in the AT&T case. The big ISPs would rather be regulated by the FTC instead of being unregulated. The FTC might occasionally slap them with big fines, but the big companies are smart enough to know that they have more exposure without regulations. If the FTC punishes AT&T for its marketing practices that’s the end of the story. But the alternative is for AT&T to have to fend off huge class action lawsuits that will seek damages far larger than what the FTC will impose. There is an underlying safety net by being regulated and the big ISPs understand and can quantify the risk of engaging in bad business practices.

In effect, as much as they say that hate being regulated, big companies like the safety of hiding behind regulators who protect them as much as they protect the public. It’s that safety net that can allow a big ISP to invest billions of capital dollars.

I really don’t think the FCC is doing the big ISPs any favors if they eliminate Title II regulations. Almost every big ISP has said publicly that they are not particularly bothered by the general principles of net neutrality – and I largely believe them. Once those rules were put into place the big companies made plans based upon those rules. The big ISPs did fear that some future FCC might use Title II rules to impose rate regulation – much as the disaster with the cable companies in the past. But overall the regulation gives them a framework to safely invest in the future.

I have no doubt that the political pendulum will eventually swing the other way – because it always does. And when we next get a democratic administration and Congress, we are likely to see much of the regulations being killed by the current FCC put back into place by a future one. That’s the nightmare scenario for a big ISP – to find that they have invested in a business line that might be frowned upon by future regulators.

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One of the most frustrating things for regulators has to be when giant ISPs renege on regulatory deals they’ve negotiated and don’t follow through with their promises. Books could be written listing all of the times when big ISPs have promised to do something and then never did it.

I am reminded of one such deal when I read that New York City is suing Verizon over its broken promise to bring FiOS fiber to the city. The lawsuit states that almost a million households are still unable to get FiOS, although the company had promised full coverage when they got a franchise from the city in 2008. In that agreement Verizon promised to bring fiber service to the whole city by 2014. The agreement with the city required that Verizon bring fiber, in conduit, directly in front of, behind, or otherwise adjacent to every residential building in the City.

Verizon had a similar longstanding dispute with the State of Pennsylvania. Back in 2002 the company made a promise to bring DSL service to cover 80% of the state as a prerequisite for the company being relieved of a lot of regulatory oversight by the state. But Verizon never completed a lot of the needed upgrades and huge parts of rural Pennsylvania still didn’t have DSL a decade later.

I wrote a blog a few months back about Charter in New York. There the state had found that the cable modems deployed by the company were not technically capable of delivering anything close to the speeds that the company was advertising. Charter agreed to fix the problem, but five years later had made almost no upgrades and was recently sued by the State.

I could list more examples all day long and there have been disputes all across the country with major telcos and cable companies that have made deals with regulators and then either ignored the agreements or only implemented them in a half-hearted manner.

The problem is that there are really no regulatory penalties that are big enough to penalize an ISP for not doing what it promised. There have been fines levied, but those fines are never nearly as big as the profits or savings realized by the ISPs for ignoring the agreements with regulators. For example, it’s unlikely that lawsuits or penalties will be able to force Verizon to finish the FiOS build in New York City. I am sure the company built to the parts of NYC that made economic sense and decided, for whatever reason, that there is not sufficient payback to justify building to the remaining parts of the city.

And that’s what regulators fail to recognize – big ISPs make decisions based upon the anticipated return for stockholders. I think it’s likely that in many of these cases that the big ISPs had no intention of complying with their agreements from the start. The cynical side of me says that they are often willing to take the upsides associated with these kinds of deals – be that decreased regulation or the ability to complete a merger – while knowing up front that they are unlikely to ever complete whatever they have agreed to do.

I think we are likely to see another round of broken promises in a few years as we start moving towards the end of the FCC’s CAF II program. The big telcos accepted over $9 billion over six years to improve rural broadband to speeds of at least 10 Mbps. I’ve been getting feedback from a lot of areas in the country that those deployments seem to be behind schedule. It will certainly come as no surprise if one or more of the big telcos spends the CAF II funding without bringing broadband to the promised households, or else will deliver speeds under the promised levels. The FCC recently issued a warning to carriers telling them that it expects them to fulfill the CAF II commitments – and I suspect that warning is due to the same kind of rumblings I’ve been hearing.

But ultimately the FCC doesn’t really have any way to make these telcos complete the builds. They might withhold future funding from the telcos, but as the FCC keeps eliminating regulation it is going to have very little ability to enforce the original CAF II agreements or to take any steps to really penalize the telcos.

The saddest part of these various broken promises is that millions of real people get hurt. It’s been reported that there are significant pockets of residents in urban areas like New York City that still don’t have even one broadband provider. There are huge rural swaths of the country that are desperate for any kind of broadband, which is what CAF II is supposed to deliver for the first time. But I think we need to be realistic in that big ISPs often do not meet their promises – whether deliberately or not. And perhaps it’s finally time to stop making these big deals with companies that have a history of broken promises.

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Since Comcast and Charter are now embarking in the cellular business we are soon going to find out if there is any marketing power in a quad bundle. Verizon, and to a smaller degree AT&T, has had the ability to create bundles including cellular service, but they never really pushed this in the marketplace in the way that Comcast is considering.

Comcast has said that the number one reason they are entering the cellular business is to make customers “stickier” and to reduce churn. And that implies offering cellular service cheaper than competitors like Verizon, or to at least create bundles that give the illusion of big savings on cellular. For now, the preliminary pricing Comcast has announced doesn’t seem to be low enough to take the industry by storm. But I expect as they gain customers that the company will find more creative ways to bundle it.

The Comcast pricing announced so far shows only a few options. Comcast is offering a $45 per month ‘unlimited’ cell plan (capped at 20 GB of data per month), that is significantly less expensive than any current unlimited plan from Verizon or AT&T. But this low price is only available now for customers who buy one of the full expensive Comcast triple play bundles. The alternative to this is a $65 per month unlimited plan that is $5 per month lower than the equivalent Verizon plan. Comcast also plans to offer family plans that sell a gigabyte of data for $12 that can be used for any phone in the plan – for many families this might be the best bargain.

One interesting feature of the Comcast plan is that it will automatically offload data traffic to the company’s WiFi network. Comcast has a huge WiFi network with over 16 million hotspots. This includes a few million outdoor hotspots but also a huge network of home WiFi routers that also act as a public hotspot. That means that customers sitting in a restaurant or visiting a home that has a Comcast WiFi connection will automatically use those connections instead of using more expensive cellular data. Depending on where a person lives or works this could significantly lower how much a consumer uses 4G data.

There are still technical issues to be worked out to allow for seamless WiFi-to-WiFi handoffs. Comcast has provided the ability for a few years for customers to connect to their WiFi hotspots. I used to live in a neighborhood that had a lot of the Comcast home hotspots. When walking my dog it was extremely frustrating if I let my cellphone use the Comcast WiFi network because as I went in and out of hotspots my data connections would be interrupted and generally reinitiated. I always had to turn off WiFi when walking to use only cellular data. It will be interesting to see how, and if Comcast has overcome this issue.

A recent survey done by the investment bank Jeffries has to be of concern to the big four cellular companies. In that survey 41% of respondents said that they would be ‘very likely’ to consider a quad play cable bundle that includes cellular. Probably even scarier for the cellular companies was the finding that 76% of respondents who were planning on shopping for a new cell plan within the next year said they would be open to trying a cellular product from a cable company.

I wrote recently about how the cellular business has entered the phase of the business where cellular products are becoming a commodity. Competition between the four cellular companies is already resulting in lower prices and more generous data plans. But when the cable companies enter the fray in all of the major metropolitan areas the competition is going to ratchet up another notch.

The cable companies will be a novelty at first and many customers might give them a try. But it won’t take long for people to think of them as just another cellular provider. One thing that other surveys have shown is that people have a higher expectation for good customer service from a cellular provider than they do for the cable companies. If Comcast is going to retain cellular customers then they are either going to have to make the bundling discounts so enticing that customers can’t afford to leave, or they are going to have to improve their customer service experience.

Even if Comcast and Charter have only modest success with cellular, say a 10% market share, they will hurt the other cellular companies. The number one driver of profits in the cellular business is economy of scale – something you can see by looking at the bottom line of Sprint or T-Mobile compared to Verizon or AT&T. If Comcast is willing to truly use cellular to help hang on to other customers, and if that means they don’t expect huge profits from the product line, then they are probably going to do very well with a quad play product.

And of course, any landline ISP competing against Comcast or Charter has to be wary. If the cellular products work as Comcast hopes then it’s going to mean it will be that much harder to compete against these companies for broadband. Bundled prices have always made it hard for customers to peel away just one product and the cable companies will heavily penalize any customers that want to take only their data product elsewhere.

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Following are some topics I found of interest but which don’t justify a whole blog.

Amazon Bringing Alexa to Settop Boxes. Amazon has created a develop kit that would allow any settop box maker to integrate their voice service Alexa. The Alexa voice platform is currently supporting the popular Echo home assistant device. It’s also being integrated into some new vehicles and Amazon has made it available for integration into a whole range of home automation devices. The Amazon Alexa platform is currently ahead of the competitors at Apple, Google and Microsoft mostly due to having made the product open to developers who have already created over 10,000 applications that will work on the platform. Adding Alexa to a settop box could make it a lot easier to use the settop box as the hub for a smart home.

Comcast Tried to Shut Down anti-Comcast Website. LookingGlass Cyber Security Center, a vendor for Comcast, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the advocacy group Fight for the Future. This group is operating a website called comcastroturf.com. The advocacy group claims that Comcast has used bots to generate over a half million fake filings to the FCC in the network neutrality docket. These comments were all in favor of killing net neutrality and the group claims that Comcast used real people’s names to sign the filings, but without their permission. The website allows people to see if their name has been used. The cease-and-desist order was withdrawn after news of it got a lot of coverage in social media.

Net Neutrality Wins in Court. Not that it probably makes much difference now that the FCC is trying to undo Title II regulation, but the challenge filed by Verizon and other large ISPs against the FCC’s net neutrality decision was rejected at appeal. This affirms the ability of the FCC to use Title II rules for regulating broadband. The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld an earlier court ruling that affirmed the FCC had the needed authority to implement the net neutrality decision.

Altice Buys Ad-Tech Company. Altice joins other big ISPs that want to take advantage of the end of the new FCC rules that allows ISPs to monetize customer’s private data. Altice, which is now the fourth largest US cable company after the acquisition of Cablevision, now joins the other big ISPs who have added the expertise to slice and dice customer data. Altice paid $300 million for Teads, a company specializing in targeting advertising based upon customer specific data.

Other large ISPs are already poised to take advantage of the new opportunity. For example, Verizon’s purchase of AOL and Yahoo brings this same expertise in-house. It has been widely speculated that the ISPs have been gathering customer data for many years and so are sitting on a huge treasure trove detailing customers web browsing usage, on-line purchasing habits, email and text information, and for the wireless ISPs the location data of cellphones.

Charter Rejects $100 Billion offer from Verizon. The New York Post reported that Charter rejected a purchase offer from Verizon. The Post reports that Charter thought the offer wasn’t high enough. It also came with some tax implications that would complicate the deal. Whether this particular offer is real or not, it points to the continuing consolidation of the industry ISPs, cable providers and cellular companies. The current administration is reportedly not against large mergers, so there’s no telling what other megadeals we might see over the next few years.

Top 7 Media CEOs made $343.8 Million in 2016. The CEOs of CBS, Comcast, Discovery Communications, Disney, Fox, Time Warner and Viacom collectively made a record salary last year, up 21.1% from 2015. It’s interesting in a time when the viewership of specific cable networks is dropping rapidly that the industry would be rewarding their leaders so handsomely. But all of these companies are compensating for losses of customers with continuing rate hikes for programming and most are having banner earnings.

Frontier Lays Off WV Senate President. Frontier just laid off Mitch Carmichael, the President of the Senate in West Virginia. This occurred right after the Senate passed a broadband infrastructure bill that was aimed at bringing more broadband competition to the state. The bill allows individuals or communities to create broadband cooperatives to build broadband infrastructure in areas with poor broadband coverage. Frontier is the predominant ISP in the state after its purchase of the Verizon property there. The West Virginia legislature is a part-time job that pays $20,000 per year and most legislators hold other jobs. West Virginia is at or near the bottom in most statistics concerning broadband speeds and customer penetration rates.